Computational Thinking and Representations

Clayton Lewis

June 25, 2010

What is “computational thinking”?

• It’s way of thinking about problems that has evolved as computational methods have spread through activities of all kinds

• It’s helpful to understand why computation has become so useful!

A Slogan:“Computational systems are representational systems”

• People use computers to represent all kinds of important stuff…

• … because computational representations have extremely valuable characteristics.

• But, what is a representation?

A Representational System

• Relates a target domain of interest to a representation domain, in which work is easier to do in some way.

• Let’s look at a couple of examples

Advantages of Computational Representations

• automation replaces costly manual or mental operations with electronic operations

• computational representations can be stored and transmitted easily and cheaply

• computational representations of behavior have flexibility advantages… – many kinds of behavior can be captured

Computational Thinking…

• …is seeing how to create a computational representation of something you are interested in

• key aspects are– identifying the important things in the

situation– identifying their behaviors

Computational Thinking Patterns…

• …are common kinds of behavior that are useful in many different situations

• you’ll learn some of these patterns, how to recognize when they are useful, and how to make them work in the AgentSheets visual programming system.

They are part of a bigger picture:

• features of a situation you are interested in

connect to

• computational things– data, programs

Some more examples

• social networking

• tracking 16th C European diplomats (Thea Lindquist)

• ant foraging

• ….